You have saved your children a few IQ points.
Mercury Spill
21–30 of 374 posts
Re: Mercury Spill
#22wow. I remember as a kid ~20 years ago playing with mercury (my grandfather was a dentist and had a 1lb bottle of the stuff for some reason)
I think if I found mercury in my house I would literally just scoop it up and bring it to the fire department without thinking about any health hazards of it. Is mercury truely that bad that short exposure is that dangerous? I mean, I wouldnt eat the stuff (or breath it in for extended periods) but I used to roll it around in my hands and whatnot as a kid without any effects.
Considering how some people work with mercury ( see this : http://www.vice.com/video/el-dorado ) , I feel like you need quite a bit of exposure to be up shits creek.
Then again, I'm not a doctor so dont listen to me.
Re: Mercury Spill
#23> Call it $50k total? Jesus fucking Christ. So I guess the lesson here for the average homeowner is "if you find a mercury spill, don't tell anyone or you'll lose your home"? Also: > They were using a Jerome meter, which can only measure down to 3000 ng/m3 when the safe indoor limit is 300 ng/m3 Huh? Why would a mercury-abatement crew use a mercury detection meter that can't actually detect hazardous levels of mercur…
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Re: Mercury Spill
#24wow. I remember as a kid ~20 years ago playing with mercury (my grandfather was a dentist and had a 1lb bottle of the stuff for some reason) I think if I found mercury in my house I would literally just scoop it up and bring it to the fire department without thinking about any health hazards of it. Is mercury truely that bad that short exposure is that dangerous? I mean, I wouldnt eat the stuff (or breath it in for e…
Same! I was 7 (25 years ago) and my dad came home with it one day from his work in a vial and I remember him putting it in my hand and letting it roll around for a few seconds. Not sure what consequences I paid for that moment in time.
Re: Mercury Spill
#25It may have cost you $50,000 but you now have +50 karma on HN and rising. Some would say a bargain! ;-] In all seriousness, cool story, glad you're okay, and this makes me think "insurance" as a business needs to be re-thought entirely. How many times has it happened that insurance companies weasel out of paying? Objectively you might think THAT was their primary job.
When one of my upstairs toilets started leaking in my house in the US, it finally got so bad that I noticed a stain on the garage ceiling. The insurance inspector said that insurance would not cover a "slow leak". I was very nice and polite and pointed out how soaked the subfloor was and that there was no way to know when the leak started (which was true). She wrote her recommendation that it be covered, which the company apparently accepted since they wrote me a check.
Definitely not $50k (more like $2.5k), but it's still disturbing that the line between insurance covering it and not covering it was so thin.
I wonder if a more thorough inspection would have caught it. Surely houses built around that time are routinely inspected for asbestos, lead-based paint, etc before purchase anyway. (Actually, going back and reading the comments, he actually addresses this point: http://www.jefftk.com/p/mercury-spill#fb-752340840802_752343.... Perhaps he could have made it a condition of purchase, that the seller pay for a mercury vapor inspection? Perhaps it's not such a common problem that such a requirement would be reasonable. Hindsight, etc.)
Re: Mercury Spill
#26I wonder how this kind of thing plays out for people that don't have anywhere near $50k available. I'm assuming since the company worked first and then invoiced, that the options would be either (1) sell the house and use the proceeds (assuming equity exists) to pay off the cleaning, or (2) declare bankruptcy.
If the company were to require pre-payment for cleaning, then it's really just down to either (1) abandon and have the bank seize the house, or (2) sell the house for pennies on the dollar to an investor.
Things like this (well, not this exotic, but like a busted sewer line which could cost $20k to replace) used to keep me up at night after we "bought" a house. I've found I can rest by mentally reframing the mortgage as rent and knowing that an "out" (strategic default) is always there if something goes very expensively wrong.
Re: Mercury Spill
#27It may have cost you $50,000 but you now have +50 karma on HN and rising. Some would say a bargain! ;-] In all seriousness, cool story, glad you're okay, and this makes me think "insurance" as a business needs to be re-thought entirely. How many times has it happened that insurance companies weasel out of paying? Objectively you might think THAT was their primary job.
Yep, an alternative model enabled by technology is mutual / cooperative insurance in which the policyholders not only own the company but also govern the release of funds. This way incentives are aligned - the insured want the insurance to act fairly, even with respect to others, so that it will be there for them. It would be something like gofundme but on a subscription basis, with up or down decision-making by subs…
Vanguard would be a good model to look towards.
Re: Mercury Spill
#28It may have cost you $50,000 but you now have +50 karma on HN and rising. Some would say a bargain! ;-] In all seriousness, cool story, glad you're okay, and this makes me think "insurance" as a business needs to be re-thought entirely. How many times has it happened that insurance companies weasel out of paying? Objectively you might think THAT was their primary job.
Wouldn't an insurance company that was TOO good at paying out go out of business? :)
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Re: Mercury Spill
#29For $50k I'd at least get some further legal opinions. I believe there's also state laws about what the specific HOx policies can actually exclude (regardless of what the actual policy says), so perhaps there's something there.
Although the causality is a latent condition from when you bought the house, which doesn't bode well. If you yourself had caused the spill when doing demo, I think you'd be in a stronger position.
Re: Mercury Spill
#30I had a physics class in a community college that had us handling open containers of mercury for our experiments. It was maybe 15 years ago. Someone in one of the classes managed to knock one of the jars over, and mercury spilled everywhere on the floor. Either the students hid their spill from the staff, or the staff just had some janitors do a simple sweeping of it, because I noticed spheres of mercury everywhere i…
> I didn't realize that mercury spills are such a huge issue until recently.
As the post mentions, the world at large didn't realize that vapors from mercury spills are toxic until recently.